I haven't used this in awhile because of an ankle injury that won't go away, and because it takes more effort than I'm willing to spend consistently to type in my Strength Training data. That's not an insult to you, eric, it's just the way it is for me. It took me some time, but I finally decided what I wanted. I want to design a strength training workout ONCE, like I do with a course, and then, when I'm in the "New Strength Training Entry" page, instead of "Course" where it lists my running courses, it says "Workout," or "Lift" or heck, even "Course." But then, when I select, say the, circuit training lift, the page loads the pre-created fields that I now just need to fill in with the lifted weight, the number of sets, and any notes on it. As opposed to now, I have to select each individual lift each time, then add the weight, the reps, the sets and the notes.
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if this idea is really transferable to other kinds of workouts, but that's because I don't swim or cycle. And I'm guessing that the Course feature works well for cycling, and if say a cyclist wanted to do an interval or fartlek or slow or race, and same for swimmer, there's that one box with the checkboxes that takes care of that. But certainly, it would work for the Strength Training.
Happy Holidays!

I've been doing more strengthening these days and I'm tired of typing in that stuff every time too, so it's pretty high on my priorities list to get it done. I'm thinking about creating templates that you can create and select from. That should fix it. Anyway, it'll be done soon.
eric

Finbarr

posted: 12/11/2006 at 5:08 PM

Niiiiiiice.

Finbarr

posted: 1/9/2007 at 3:14 AM

any new word on this?

IronJenny

posted: 1/12/2007 at 8:13 AM

Hi - if we add a "custom" entry, people like me can add in x/c skiing, which of triathletes do here in Minnesota as cross training in the winter time.

Hi, Jenny.
You can add x/c skiing as a workout type by going to Options-->My Log Preferences-->Other Workouts and then filling in "x/c skiing" in the fill-in box. After you do that, you can enter in the workout by using the drop-down box next to "New Run Entry" on the Training Log page. It should show up on the bottom of the list.
Hope that helps!
Janell

I haven't had much time to work on this. The issue is always the layout. Anyway, like I said before, I use that myself so it's annoying me as much as it annoys you. That's my incentive to get it fixed.

Nice to see you're working on this . . . as I start to get back into my strength training, I realize how difficult it is to create a generalized solution for weights . . .
Another thread talks about varying reps, and I tend to do varying weights . . .
Maybe the solution is to redo the strength training backend a bit? And since you mention layout, I'll explain my "dream" layout. (I realize that the spec I'm laying out here is pretty work intensive, and is almost like creating a whole new site, this time specific to strength training, rather than running).
I'm thinking there'd be two main components, a strength training (ST) workout creation page, and then obviously an ST entry page.
On the workout creation page, you'd fill out a table, similar to the current ST entry page, where you'd enter the type of exercise and max number of sets, and then save the set of exercises with a name. (I'd guess this is what you're planning now, without the weights entered.)
The ST entry page - here, you'd have a big table, with each row being the exercise type. The change from the current design would add columns for weight and reps, and you'd have this for each set. For example, let's say on the workout creation page, I'd specified multiple exercises, with max sets ranging from 2 to 4. On the entry page, I'd have a table listing the exercises on the left side, and then 8 additional columns (4 sets, each with a rep/weight pair). For the exercises where I'd only specified 2 max reps, the last two columns could be greyed out. The nice thing would be when selecting a workout type I'd created strength wise, the table would auto populate with the most recent data from that workout type (and maybe even state the date of that last one).
Of course, one could get really carried away with this idea, and develop crazy graphing solutions.
The major difficult here would seem to be the database. I haven't tried to download my data from the site, but ST entries as I've described, would probably require a whole new parser to create an exportable XML file.
Anyway, that's my pie-in-the-sky wish.
The feature I really desire most is being able to save ST workouts. It'd be great if it copied over my notes/weight/reps from the most recent time I did it . . . redoing the database to allow for varying weights/reps is the dream part, and I've just been entering that into the "notes" field . . .
Thanks for all your hard work and development!